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Whatever happens tonight at the Miss Universe Canada competition in Toronto, one thing is for certain: The winner will not be a natural-born woman.

Now by saying this, I am not predicting a victory for Vancouver’s own Jenna Talackova, the transgender beauty who four years ago had sex reassignment surgery. As a result, she found herself disqualified from the Miss Universe Canada competition because she is not a “natural-born” woman, though she was reinstated by competition owner Donald Trump in time for tonight’s pageant.

Nevertheless, many people maintain that she has no business competing against natural-born women, just as many people appealed to nature in arguing that male-to-female transsexuals should not participate in women’s sporting competitions or work at women’s shelters.

So we see once again the belief that Mother Nature ought to trump human nature, that when human beings make a mess of things, we can always appeal to nature to tidy things up, to provide us with an objective analysis of the way things are and the way they ought to be.

And this certainly seems so when it comes to the messy business of sex. For while modern medicine allows for a seemingly infinite array of sexual categories, nature admits of only two: male and female. Or so the argument goes.

Now in reality, biological phenomena are continuous, not discrete, so not everyone fits neatly into the male or female categories. Sex is always a messy affair, and “male” and “female” are categories humans have created to allow us to make sense of this mess, to understand sex despite the infinite variations nature produces.

For example, a person’s sex was traditionally determined by his or her physical appearance, and particularly the appearance of the genitals. However, given the advent of sex reassignment surgery, people had to look elsewhere to determine who qualified as a natural-born woman or man. And since chromosomes are ontologically prior to, and responsible for, other sexual characteristics, many people settled on chromosomes as the true signifiers of sex.

So following the argument where it leads, anyone with XY sex chromosomes qualifies as male, while anyone with XX is female. Except that’s wrong.

For example, “men” — that is, people with XY sex chromosomes – with androgen insensitivity syndrome are unable to metabolize androgens (male hormones.) As a result, they appear to be girls at birth and throughout childhood, with their conditions often not being discovered until adolescence, when they fail to menstruate.

Nevertheless, most go on to identify and live as women, despite being genetically male, and some historians believe that Wallis Simpson, for whom King Edward abdicated the throne, was one such woman.

Similarly, genetically male (XY) individuals with a condition known as 5-@-reductase deficiency lack the ability to convert testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. Many therefore appear as girls at birth, and are raised as girls throughout childhood. Yet since they also possess internal male genitals, they often become masculinized at puberty and therefore effectively “change” sexes.

Some genetic women — that is, people with XX chromosomes — with a metabolic disorder known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia produce abnormally high levels of male hormones. Consequently, they tend to develop typically masculine characteristics, including masculinized genitals, deep voices, large muscles and significant body hair.

These few conditions — and there are many more — reveal that chromosomes, while perhaps the first word, are not and should not be the last word when it comes to determining sex. And in any case, chromosomal makeup is as messy as everything else.

For example, not everyone fits neatly into the XX/XY human-made dichotomy. Men with Klinefelter’s syndrome possess XXY sex chromosomes, and because they typically produce less testosterone than other boys, tend to be less muscular, with less facial and body hair. Similarly, women with Turner syndrome have but one sex chromosome — a single X — and tend to have underdeveloped female sexual characteristics.

Perhaps most interesting of all, people need not have the same chromosomal makeup in every cell in their bodies. Rather, some people possess a genetic “mosaic” with, for example, just one X chromosome in some cells and an XY combination in others. And some “women” are predominantly XY — indeed, although rare, women with as much as 96 per cent XY chromosomal material have given birth.

So Jenna Talackova might not be the only XY up on stage tonight. (In fact, she might not be XY at all; she might instead be XXY or some other chromosomal combination that’s none of my business. Or yours.)

But what all of this reveals is that there is no such thing as a natural-born woman, because the category of woman — and the category of man — are human inventions, not facts of nature. And judging by our biology, many of us do not fit those categories.

Now to be sure, biology is not irrelevant, as we do rely on genetics, hormones and physical appearance in assigning sex. But biology is not determinative — or to put it more poetically, we do not, as Plato had it, “carve nature at its joints.”

Indeed, our very language reflects the fact that biology does not, by itself, determine sex. For when a child is born, we do not “discover” his or her sex, but rather we “assign” it. And assigning a sex is always a social and legal act, never a biological fact.

This explains why Talackova had sex reassignment surgery rather than sex change surgery. Talackova’s change, such as it was, involved our placing her in a different social and legal category, not a change in her nature.

So for all the grumbling, Trump clearly made the right decision in eliminating the incoherent and self-contradictory natural-born woman requirement. For like every other contestant on the stage tonight, Jenna Talackova was not born a woman; she became one.

A Radio-Canada reporter has been arrested for alleged criminal harassment while pursuing the subject of a story. According to Radio-Canada, reporter Antoine Trépanier was arrested Tuesday night by Gatineau police. He was released on a promise to appear in court. Trépanier was called by Gatineau police Tuesday evening and an officer requested that he come […]

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